Ivette
Parhizkar
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My research is concerned with how diasporic histories of dispossession in the 20th and 21st-century Americas are told as material histories. In other words: I am interested in how artifacts, land, remains, and other matter—as the physical core of human knowledge and experience—anchor poetic accounts of loss. I am especially interested in creative work that is driven by persistent acts of gathering or “collecting.” Across literature, art, and performance, I examine how such aesthetic practices emerge at odds with the material abundance of the developed world and its colonial foundations. My peer-reviewed scholarship is forthcoming in the journal American Quarterly.
I have also contributed to the field of Central American studies in my scholarship, creative practice, and curatorial work. In 2024 while at Yale, I co-founded/co-chaired the Central American Futurities Conference––the first transnational conference in the northeastern United States dedicated to Central American thought and life. With U.S.-based Central American collective Tierra Narrative (TN), I have co-curated transnational literatures and works in translation from throughout the Americas for The Poetry Project (NYC) and FENCE magazine. I produced and co-created the TN multimedia film project Que hora es en el reloj del mundo? / What Time is it on the Clock of the World? (2024), commissioned by the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present and the Park Avenue Armory in New York. With TN member Óscar Moisés Díaz, I co-edited and introduced a folio of Salvadoran women writers, all made available in English by translators of Salvadoran heritage, published digitally by FENCE in 2025.
As a poet, essayist, and translator, my work has been published by NACLA Report on the Americas, Annulet: A Journal of Poetics, New England Review, Jewish Currents, Social Text Online, The Rumpus, The Offing, Academy of American Poets Poet-a-Day, and elsewhere, as well as in three chapbooks. You can find most of that work here. My work as a writer has been supported by organizations CantoMundo and Letras Latinas. As of 2026, I serve as Poetry Editor of the NACLA Report on the Americas.
I grew up in southwest Houston (Alief) with ancestral roots in eastern El Salvador and northern Iran. Before returning to Texas, I spent two decades of my life in the northeast.